Lyndon B Johnson once said of FBI Director J Edgar Hoover that it was ‘better to have him inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in’.  I moved into America’s tent in July last year and have been pissing inside it ever since.  I’ve been working for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart in New York which although primarily is one of the best comedy shows in the world, has also come to represent a venting point for disaffected America.

The United States is presented to the rest of the world as a united front, and it is this image which fosters much of the anti-American resentment which wafts around the planet.  But make no mistake; from California to the New York Island, from the redwood forest to the Gulf Stream Waters, this is a divided nation.  

As a comedian, I have often been told by people how much I must love this President as he ‘makes my job easy’.  Of course, this is profoundly insulting on both a professional and a human level.  My personal feelings about him are summed up best not with words but with a primal scream, howled into a raging tempest.  And professionally, if anything he makes writing comedy harder.  

Lazy stand-ups have come to love quoting ill formed sentences he has spewed as evidence of his idiocy, often to peals of laughter from a drunken audience who should know better.  But this comedic approach to the administration, just like the administration itself, is simply not good enough.  To claim that he is an idiot is to turn him into a kind of loveable buffoon, and one who is not responsible or accountable for his actions.  

When the Republicans lost Congress to the Democrats in the Midterm Elections the response at the Daily Show was not concern over the curtailing of Bush’s near slapstick foreign policy, but relief that we could begin to write different kinds of jokes attacking a broader political spectrum.  

It may well be that the world is currently living through the worst administration in American history.  And joking about something so despicable can occasionally be a depressing experience.  Just a couple of weeks ago we found ourselves having to write about the Walter Reed Medical Centre scandal – the shameful treatment of soldiers asked to fight a shameful war.  And that’s not in fact a very edifying way to spend a day.  After performing the show that night, I just wanted to go home and wash it all off me.  

So, spare a thought for the millions of Americans who are watching the White House with shame, anger and revulsion.  Because they are currently in an unenviable position, and one that Britain has been in before.  Thank goodness the worst days of the British Empire were not played out in front of a technologically advanced world media.  Is anyone else glad that the Amritsar massacre is only recorded in watercolour?  And that a press secretary in a handlebar moustache did not stand in front of a podium of microphones and attempt to justify it?  Let’s remember, the White House is only white because we set fire to the previous version in 1812 – which thankfully was not streamed live at the time on CNN.

When January 20, 2009 comes around, I doubt there will be much in the way of celebration, partly because there will be no remorse from those whose possessions are in boxes.  Whenever Dick Cheney appears on the news now, it is painfully obvious that he couldn’t give less of a shit what the world thinks of him.  John Bolton, the ex US Ambassador to the UN appeared as a guest on the Daily Show this past week, and he too does not regret a thing.  As I walked past him in the corridor I was expecting to see a demonic figure, the kind who is comfortable cackling in a swivel chair whilst stroking a cat.  But of course he was just a normal, little man who truly thinks that he has done a decent job.  I even had to shake his hand, which I can report was like shaking hands with a badly cooked tuna steak.  

Let’s take this opportunity to remember this administration as it truly is.  Let’s not allow it to be re-invented by history as something more worthwhile.  Let’s leave the wound open so we can recognize its sting.  Someone came up to me on the street in New York yesterday and gave me a key fob which is digitally counting down the days to Bush’s departure.  As I type this it reads 668 days, 10 hours, 48 minutes and 32 seconds.  Now 31 seconds.  Now 30.  Now 29.  You get the picture.  The fact that someone would see commercial opportunity in exploiting how much people want Bush out of office is a magnificently capitalist response to political anger.  It’s the American dream.

January 20, 2009.  I’m not saying everything’s going to be fine after that.  But I’ll be amazed if it can possibly be worse.